Daily Archives: May 27, 2011

MAY 27, 2011. For a moment here, I’m stepping away from my recent work to comment about it.

In case you hadn’t noticed, lately I’ve been pushing my exploration of imagination into new dimensions. And I haven’t been holding back.

The quality of emails I’ve gotten has been quite fantastic. There ARE people out there who’ve been looking for, wanting, something like this. Or they didn’t think they did until they saw it in my articles.

At the same time, I realize some readers have found it hard to stay on board. So what to do?

Do I try to dilute what I’m writing? Do I try to straddle both ends of a bridge?

Well, that’s a bit of a dilemma.

We’ve all been taught that “success” comes from adjusting your mode of communication to appeal to the widest possible audience. We have movies, TV, and media as examples of that.

But I’m not really in the business of doing a juggling act. I’m not trying to gauge a “model” based on who will stick around if I write about X versus who will stick around if I write about Y.

Take the word “imagination.” I could break down the meaning so the word appears to be “just slightly ahead of our time,” as the old commercial went. I could gear my articles about imagination so they would seem to be just a few feet beyond where most people are. I could try to advance in tiny increments—hoping not to lose readers.

Of course, that approach would deny everything I’ve been saying about how imagination works. It isn’t a tight protocol or a closed system or a step-by-step manual.

Now, if you go to the store on my site, you will find audio seminars like: Mind Control, Mind Freedom; The Transformations; and The Magic and Mystery of Dialogue—where I do present techniques and exercises that really work. They DO expand imagination and its power to create realities. But those exercises aren’t timid little flips and twists. They’re big engines that operate on a wide superhighway.

The point of those exercises—and these articles—is to EXPAND THE TERRITORY.

So in the end, regardless of what happens to “the business model,” I’ll keep going as I have been going. Taking things to the limit and beyond. Because there is no limit. That’s been my premise since the beginning, and it still holds.

If my email list shrinks down to six people, I’ll probably leave a close-out piece on my site and go back to painting, writing, music, and poetry/fiction full time.

I’m not in charge of how people react to these articles.

I just want you to know how I’m looking at the present situation—which certainly has an upside, in terms of the things some of you are saying in your emails to me. For which I’m very appreciative. Excited. Inspired.

This society, civilization, planet—whether or not we have current crises of large proportions—has been in a doldrum for a long, long time. And the reason for it is simple. As a result of various breakthroughs, people found themselves on the cusp of realizing that imagination and creative power WERE the next step.

But they were unwilling to take it. They stalled at the gate. They comforted themselves with other stories, other fairy tales. They were horses led to water, but they weren’t going to drink. Despite the fact that the human race had offloaded so many paralyzing myths, people found new forms of paralysis.

They found new fundamentalisms and re-found old fundamentalisms.

The future isn’t only about what imagination produces, it’s about imagination itself—as the recognized power source we use to drive us into untold realms and fulfillments.

Okay. That’s what I wanted to say for now.

Let’s move along to this:

ON THE SPACESHIP SS GRINDER, a gigantic bloated vessel hanging in space off the edge of the Milky Way, a rescue crew finds NO ONE. The cabins and offices and labs on all decks are empty. Clean and empty. The engines are fused.

After a six-month on-board investigation, a crew member discovers a sealed cylinder on a shelf in a small cabin. Opening it, he removes a handwritten note, titled:

Merlin speaks:

Look, I’ve been making universes for a long time. I don’t make a big deal of out of it because I don’t have to.

I crank them out. Some I build, some I create whole-hog in a few seconds, maybe less.

I gave up the robe and the beard and the scepter and the stone and the sword a little while after Arthur and that whole crowd faded.

Did you know you could create a minus universe? This isn’t anti-matter nonsense, and it isn’t a reversed mirror image of something else. It’s just minus. It basically ISN’T—but there it is.

I like those. It’s a kick. In fact, evidence is mounting you people live in a minus universe. The downside is you tend to mill around and screw things up. I’ve always said a person who would take up residence in a minus universe for longer than a year is nuts. He gets the sun, the waves, the beach, a few adventures in the city—it’s time to check out.

What is magic?

Imagination. Pursued long enough and intensely enough.

That’s all.

That’s all I do.

You’d think this would be an easy point to get across, but it isn’t.

I can make things vanish and reappear. It’s a side effect of imagination.

People deny the existence of magic on three counts: it’s impossible, it’s hard, or it’s a delusion.

I wasn’t born lucky. I worked at it for a long time. I didn’t practice making things disappear. I just lived by imagination. So it wasn’t a chore, it was what I wanted to be doing.

I lived through what some people call the old magic era, when lots of people were making magic all over the place.

And I lived through technological ages that would make yours look like a wooden wagon coming out of a cave.

One thing I notice about you—you’re hypnotizing yourselves right out of imagination. It’s quite a trick. It’s a kind of magic all its own.

I know places where the people are very wishy-washy, and I bet they’d pay you a pretty penny to teach them that trick.

Imagination is like love. You keep saying you don’t want it or you yearn for it or you’re looking for it—right up to the moment when it happens. Then you stop dead in your tracks, because you know this is it.

Imagination feels a little like the future, until you use it right now, and then you make the future and present. That may sound strange, but it’s true.

Once I had an altercation with a guy who claimed he was the god of a universe I made. Can you believe that? He told me he’d made it. It was all his. I explained he was a rank liar. Then on top of that, he told me he’d give me a free pass to get in!

Some people do that. They set up shop in a place you made and they go around selling other people on their story.

You’re being sold a lot of stories. You can tell, because sooner or later they always involve giving up a piece of freedom. First you pay, then you lose. It’s a double scam.

But the worst thing I see happening when I look at your home base is the novelty con. Whatever you’re interested in on Monday, on Tuesday it has to be something else. That’s a crime and punishment all rolled into one. It cuts the legs out from under anything that’s good.

See, that’s imagination at work, too, although you might not recognize it. Just a little below the surface, you’re convincing yourself you’re bored with something that lasts longer than five minutes. You’re creating your own boredom.

And no drug is going to cure that.

You imagine you’re “human beings,” and the various definitions of that fiction floating around would drive away tourists faster than swarms of bees. You’ve concocted patterns of life that are their own prisons. Some of your most impassioned and articulate spokesmen for freedom are pushing it like dishwasher soap. It’s evident their own lives are far from free.

Remember the old phrase, Midas Touch? These days, it’s the Android Touch. Whatever androids brush up against tends to develop androidal qualities.

The question is, do you want to get out of that?

Your world is a copy of itself. It’s enduring on that basis. Actually, it went to sleep a long time ago, but the replica lives on.

Like a cartoon.

I know, everything looks and feels as real as ever, but it’s animation.

When a person goes to sleep, his vague memory of the world behind and below him is a kind of sketch. When he stays asleep, the sketch BECOMES the world. That’s a bit of a metaphor, but it makes the point.

So you’re in and on Earth Two.

The engines of this ship worked for a while, but then they fused because they were entering, shall we say, another level of reality, and they just weren’t up to the task.

I watched the frustration grow as the slowdown occurred. Nothing could be done. Finally, the entire crew vanished. It was their first act of magic.

They went into a gray area, a limbo. They’re there now, trying to figure out how to proceed. Staying on the ship would have destroyed their bodies, as the sense of weight increased.

I believe the crew will eventually find a way out. When driven to the brink…interesting solutions occur.

Meanwhile, plastic cameos of the SS Grinder will be sold to millions of people.

Since I have time on my hands, here are a few of my lesser known quotes:

“You can create the same thing over and over, and eventually you’ll be about as alive as a table. Inject imagination into the mix, and everything suddenly changes. You can steer that boat anywhere you want to. You can steer it into nothing and build worlds.”

“More imagination equals more life. You can try to fight that formula and its corollaries, but you won’t win.”

“Sitting around in a cosmic bus station waiting for reality is what reality is. Everything else is imagination.”

“The most overrated word in any language is ‘exists.’”

“Traveling to places one has never seen is far different from creating something that never existed before.”

“Sooner or later, you will come across people who try to assert that every power is ‘inherent in the universe.’ They will describe such power. They will keep on doing this until they realize that nothing they have discovered begins to explain consciousness or imagination. You don’t have to care about any of that. All you need to do is create with imagination for a few million years, and everything will come clear.”

“You make me a painting of something that never was. I make you a painting of something that never was. The beginning of a true friendship.”